What would the world of our greatest hopes and dreams look like and what can we do to make it a reality? 

I grew up watching Captain Kangaroo, Mister Rogers, Sesame Street, and the Electric Company; and I lived in a stable home where I felt safe and protected. I was also fortunate to grow up in a town, neighborhood, and school system that was racially diverse. Perhaps a combination of all of these factors led me to be a fairly optimistic child. I genuinely thought that our country was getting beyond the problems of our past, problems about which I knew very little at the time. I just thought that everyone would naturally want to work together to make things better for everyone. 

When I was a young boy I was mesmerized by Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech that was given just three years before my birth. When I listened to King’s words, I simply felt it in my bones that this was the dream that we were all living into. I felt fortunate to be living in a time when such a dream was becoming a reality – or at least I thought. 

As I was growing up in an integrated neighborhood and an integrated school, with friends, classmates, and teammates of various races; I was under the impression that the country was finally growing up and moving beyond the racism of its past. I did not yet understand the white backlash that had come with every period of progress for black and brown people. I did not yet understand how deeply entrenched the sin of the ideology of white supremacy was and is within our country. 

It was not until the white backlash against the presidency of a black man that I fully realized how much in danger continued progress for racial equality in the United States actually was. What I thought was the death throes of white supremacy during the election of 2016 has become a full-blown resurgence of explicit and life-shattering racism across the United States, which has led to concentration camps full of black and brown people in the United States, ongoing third country deportations, thousands of family separations, multiple violations of international law, and the premature death of hundreds of thousands of black and brown people around the world owing to cuts in USAID and a number of tragically unnecessary wars of aggression. 

We have to be awake to the fact that our current tragic situation in the United States and Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of hope are both part of America. One represents our national nightmare; the other our national dream. One is the original sin of America from which we must repent; the other is the path of redemption towards Beloved Community to which justice loving persons must aspire. One leads to a violent insurrectionist “March on the Capitol” that will live forever in infamy; the other leads to MLK’s “March on Washington” that will forever inspire love and justice. One is a path backwards to the big lie of white supremacy, division, and hate; the other is the path forward to truth and reconciliation.

Freedom and justice have never been won easily or without a struggle in the history of humankind. Perhaps we thought that our big national struggles on these fronts were in the past, but they are not. They are here right now. Now is our time to take care of each other so we can join in this struggle together.

It is natural to be down about what we are currently experiencing. It is natural to want to give up. But people and the planet are counting on us to pick up the mantle and join the ongoing and fiercely urgent struggle for freedom and justice in times like these. 

Even in the midst of our current national nightmare, we must continue to dream and envision what our world could be like if we get if right. We must be as relentless in working for systems of love, justice, and equality as the white supremacists have been in perpetuating racism and injustice. We must be relentless in making our dream of beloved community a reality. 

We must also come to terms with the reality that the nightmare of white supremacy is not only racist. It is also deeply patriarchal and misogynist, and it seeks to erase the rights and sometimes even the lives of women and persons who are LGBTQIA+. In working to wake up from our current national nightmare, we must live into the wisdom of King’s insight that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” and thus we must fight injustice anywhere it is being expressed. 

I invite us all to focus our attention on MLK’s dream that all of us in this one great world house might live, love, and work together for the realization of a just and beloved community. 

We have a dream that one day white supremacy will be throughly rejected and relegated to the garbage heap of history. 

We have a dream that vulnerable black and brown people around the world will have an equal opportunity for human flourishing as all other people in the world. 

We have a dream that love and justice will be for all people – every single one, no matter what their race, gender, sexual orientation, or gender indentiy might be. 

We have a a dream that we can build a society that lives sustainably so that future generations might simply live and have an opportunity to flourish on this good earth. 

We have a dream that all persons will live into and embrace the values of interdependence, equity, transformation, pluralism, generosity, and justice – and that we might always keep love at the center of all we say and do. 

In closing and with a hat tip to John Lennon:

“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will live as one.” – Imagine